Sunday, 25 July 2010

This is the furthest I've deviated from the original designs so far. But seen as though the music from Scrap Brain is so obviously inspired by Bladerunner, I wanted to pay a little homage too, though hopefully it's still recognizable as the original level.

EDIT: Doryan in the comments asked to see some sketches that led up to this. So I dug through some old hard drives to find the original PSD. Under all the layers was my original sketches underneath! UNFORTUNATELY, they are not very different from what you see. I settled on this idea immediately. This was early in my career as an artist and I had not yet been convinced by the importance of thumb-nailing loadsa ideas! So all you see is this one idea evolving slightly.

Sorry, Doryan. If you were looking for cool images, you wont find them here. All you'll find here is poorly drawn compositional sketches!In fact the only thing that really changed was the curve..

I initially started with this composition. Much closer on Sonic, and an exaggerated curve to the landscape.
Here you can see I zoomed out a little, but kept the curve.

Here's where I lost the curve...
And this is the final sketch I used as a basis for the piece.

Thanks a lot to Doryan for asking! It was fun to look at this one again, and I was very glad to see that there was loads of stuff I'd improve on if I was doing it today.

Before I pitched Badly Animated, I was also toying with the idea of making this. It's about living in the city as a kid, and how the urban jungle becomes a playground. It's is also about how an event can end your childhood. The former is semi-autobiographical, the latter is not.